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Our next fall deadline is October 15, 2023 11:59pm PT. Apply today to lock in your spot!

10-session deep dive into a research topic of your choice

6-week research project with an expert and peers who share your passion

A career discovery experience with 3 expert mentors in your chosen fields

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Neural circuits, animal behavior, neuroscience of addiction, psychiatry and alternative medicine

To be added by Ian

Jaehong will be choosing a Kaggle or other publicly available dataset to study via machine learning. We have discussed methods that can be used in machine learning for image analysis and how experiments in ML can be designed. Jaehong has proposed to both write a research paper and compose a literature review on the disease included in the dataset. Our next milestones include the selection of the dataset, and collecting the papers that will be used in Jaehong's literature review.

Preparation for Pre-Med or STEM Undergraduate studies. Entrepreneurship and Business. Scientific Research. Data Science and Analytics.

Machine Learning Model and Literature Review

As the mechanical aspect of engineering becomes more and more popular, students require a hands-on project that can help them be more interested in STEM. Robotics is a great way for students to learn about how to build a robot to reach the requirement while also learning to program it so it can apply for competitions. While robotics is a course offered in many high schools and colleges, those who either graduated college or are in middle school and below might no have access to a robotics class in school. The AWS is a great start-up project for those who are interested in competing in robotics. Students or even adults can make progress in building the AWS robot and submitting it into virtual competitions, where they can compete with users all across the world. Users will program their robot to complete a racecourse and try to complete the race as quickly as possible. Users can make an account to save their progress and even see themselves on the ranking leaderboards of all participating racers. The AWS Deepracer is completely anonymous and has a built-in camera that tracks the robot's progress around the physical track course, which is then displayed virtually for the opponent to see. Similar to any other racing tournament, consistently winning races against other opponents advances you through the brackets. Racers can compete for prizes and even advance to the Championship Cup. I hope that with the AWS Deepracer, I can get an understanding of how to build the most efficient robot possible while growing my knowledge in computer science to program the robot. I hope I can enjoy this project while also learning a lot, and progress through the rounds of competition to rank high in the leaderboard. Even without a win, the most important thing about this project is to enjoy your time with the robot and to find a career path that might interest you.

Wireless sensing, robotics, systems engineering.

How can any student learn about the building and programming process of an AWS Robot?

This study examines the relation between peer interactions and social-emotional development in preschool-aged children. Indeed, past work has indicated that positive peer interactions have a positive impact on social-emotional development, and that social-emotional development is important in preparing children to learn in school. This pilot study assesses the relationship between preschool-aged children’s frequency of peer interactions and their social-emotional development. For this study, parents of five children from the same church preschool class reported the amount of peer interaction their child generally engaged in and their social-emotional development. The results showed a negative correlation between Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) scores (i.e., the number of social-emotional issues) and amount of play interactions. While not statistically significant, the findings directionally support the hypothesis that increased number of peer interactions appears to be associated with fewer social-emotional issues. A larger study is warranted to replicate results with statistical significance and to identify specific conditions when peer interaction has a measurable impact on a child’s social-emotional development.

developmental psychology, child-related policy, social and neurobiological mechanisms

Associations Among Peer Interaction and Social-Emotional Development in Early Childhood

Joshua will be conducting a literature review studying how the socioeconomic class and income level of families may affect dental anxiety in children. He will seek out sources with similar methodology and analyze whether his hypothesis that a lower family income level is related to higher levels of dental anxiety. This project will focus on an international perspective, and will attempt to see if this true across multiple countries. He will write a meta-review of these sources and then will showcase the paper. 

Biology, Dentistry, Medicine, Public Health, Community Service/Philanthropy, Biomedical Sciences, Entrepreneurship

How Family Income Levels Affect Pediatric Dental Anxiety

Sohyun is working on a short book/article that she would like to either self-publish via Amazon or publish in a student journal. She  wants to promote the message that education is essential for development of children, in order to inspire a target audience of high schoolers who have had privilege of receiving education and may not fully recognize its value. She'll start by speaking on her own experiences in education and comparing that to her grandparents' experiences growing up without an education in South Korea and to the children she witnessed in Haiti that either grew up with or without an education. In particular, she wants to explore the social and emotional impacts of access to education and the barriers that different populations face to obtaining an education. While she's keeping the material accessible and easily understandable by the general public, she wants to incorporate research and established theories on psychological development to provide evidence for the impact and importance of education. She wants to end her piece with a call to action, with ways to help others access an education and future directions for research.

School psychology, general psychology, creative writing

Multicultural Perspectives on the Importance of Education by and for the Youth

Telomeres are specialized structures that protect the tips of eukaryotic  chromosomes. Telomerase is an  enzyme that rebuilds telomeres and  maintains  genomic stability by extending telomeres after each cell division. Telomerase activity prevents cellular aging, and immortalized cell lines can be created by inducing expression of telomerase in cells that normally lack telomerase. However, activation of telomerase can often lead to cancer development by preserving genomic stability in rapidly dividing cells. In healthy cells, telomeres achieve the healthy balance between limiting cellular lifespan and keeping cancer growth at bay. 

Research has shown telomerase activity to be a biomarker of cancer, making it an attractive target for cancer therapy. This review focuses on telomeres and telomerase, and the role that they play in oncogenesis. Furthermore, it will discuss different novel therapies involving telomerase, and their mechanisms of action and future potential. Finally, it will consider the conflict of interest between using telomerase to battle either aging or cancer. While the notion of using telomerase as treatment for disease remains relatively new and unexplored, there is no doubt that it is a field of active interest.   

This is a review paper about telomeres, and the role that they play in cancer development and progression. It provides an overview of telomeres (structure, function, etc.), telomerase, cancer, and more. It then connects the two together, and the importance of telomere activity, teloemrase activity, and ALT in cancer. It then moves on to discuss different methods of cancer treatment involving telomerase that have been developed until the present.

Cancer Biology, Molecular/Cellular Biology, Biochemistry, Science Communication, Immunology, Medicine, Biochemistry, Cell Death, Metabolism

What role do telomerase play in oncogenesis? Alternatively, do they have any potential in cancer prevention or treatment?

Haley will be writing about presidential leadership styles. She will analyze four presidents, two from each of the major leadership style categories. She will analyze their leadership styles across presidential activities including foreign policy, campaigning, and speeches/addressing the American people. She will analyze each president individually and compare the presidents. She will discuss specific examples to illustrate their leadership styles.

Government, Politics, Law, Legal Theory, U.S. Legal History, Social Sciences

Presidential Leadership Styles

The death penalty, fundamentally, is a system that goes against the Eighth Amendment. Over time, individual states have abolished it, but ideally so will the Supreme Court on the federal level. Not only are the conditions of death row downright horrible, but the system itself is incredibly flawed. Amanda has spent much time culminating an op-ed on how and why the death penalty must be abolished. 


Ethics and Public Policy; Political Theory; American Politics; Law

The Inevitable Demise of the Death Penalty - Op-Ed

It is common and expected for a survivor of human trafficking to experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), physical injuries, and various mental health issues as a result of these events. These psychological effects are developed by the trauma a survivor experienced. Once integrated into society, these effects continue to affect the survivor while they work to rejoin society financially, socially, and physically. Another psychological effect is battered woman syndrome. BWS is an extension of PTSD but includes characteristics that include social and self-image issues in addition to trauma response issues. Specifically, issues of disrupted interpersonal relationships, body image distortion and/or somatic or physical complaints, and sexual intimacy issues are brought to the forefront in instances of battered woman syndrome. With a focus on the psychological effects stemming from sex-trafficking, traits of BWS are consistent across all survivors. A survivor’s experience can sum to more than the symptoms listed within PTSD. Introducing battered woman syndrome as a descriptor of the physiological effects of survivors will help properly identify and understand a survivor’s experience while in the system and also when rejoining society. Analyzing how the characteristics of battered woman syndrome more accurately portray a survivor’s physiological state, more so than the indicators of PTSD, can help build a better understanding of a survivor’s experience. With a new perspective of a survivor’s experience through the lens of battered woman syndrome, their psychological effects and responses from their trauma can be analyzed with further certainty.

Sociology, Criminal Justice System, Laws, Protection, Race, Gender, Psychology

Sex Trafficking: Correcting the Denotations of a Survivor's Experience

As a freshman at Liberty Senior High School in Renton, Washington, I recently became fascinated with Alzheimer's disease after watching the documentary "Monster in the Mind." Despite numerous medical advancements and ongoing investigations by dementia specialists worldwide, the underlying cause of Alzheimer's remains a mystery. This sparked my curiosity, and I decided to delve deeper into this topic. With the guidance of my mentor Jessica Apulei, who has experience studying Alzheimer's, I have compiled information from various sources such as documentaries, articles, interviews, and journal publications to create a website to educate others about this disease. I hope you find my website informative and invite you to explore it.

Biology, Neuroscience, Epigenetics

Alzheimer's disease

Throughout the history of medicine, there has been a paradigm of cultures holding the soul in high regard. In Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM), it was qi. In Ayurvedic medicine, it was the chakras. Almost all civilizations held the soul to a standard of importance just as high as the body. In fact, for most of western history, people thought that homeostasis would only be maintained in the body by ensuring the unity between the body and the soul, which was common among the ideologies of the time. However, due to the scientific revolution, western medicine started to deviate from this ideology and became focused solely on the body. Becoming further"westernized" in their thinking, healthcare in the west began to be focused more on the body as medical professionals started to reject this traditional way of thinking and focus on only what they could see in the material world. This deviation from the traditional thinking had a great impact on healthcare across the world. On one hand, modern medicine is able to cure ailments and diseases in record time and with much efficency. However, one must ask themself if this is truly worth the erasure of culture and maybe even the key to future medical innovations. 



Biology, Music Composition/Theory, Creative Writing

Western Medicine and the Soul

The goal of this project is to create an application that can identify misinformation in news articles, in addition to identifying a liberal/conservative bias and whether the article is an opinion article or not, with a possible website to accompany it. The program will use machine learning to be trained on a variety of pre-labeled articles to understand word choice among other variables in fake news. With this program, users could assess the reliability of an article before reading it, so that the spread of articles containing lies and deception is lessened.

machine learning, data science, NLP, language generation, data journalism, deep learning, web scraping, creative coding, narrative generation, AI

Misinformation Recognition

Tentative (we'll fill in the abstract next time): looking at differences by demographic group in educational attainment in India, studying the effect 
 of affirmative action on educational attainment of minority groups, or connecting to STEM education/IT book in some way 

Economics, Macroeconomics, Finance, Business, Economic Policy, Applied Math, Statistics, Econometrics, Data Analysis, Algorithms, Optimization

Tentative: demographic differences in educational attainment in India

Swimming is one of the most popular sports to watch during the Summer Olympic Games. Similar to other sports, swimming in the Olympics has been taken more seriously by its competitors and fans over the recent decades. With the introduction of new techniques, technologies, and training regimens, the modern swimming times have shattered Olympic records going back only a few decades. The easiest way to analyze these results is through data visualization. In the poster, the combination of qualitative insights and visualizations will tell the story of how competitive international swimming has changed over the past 100 years. ​


Sport Analytics and Data Science

Analyzing and Visualizing Olympic Swimming​ Data using R​

The hijras, a once celebrated LGBTQ+ community in pre-colonial northern India, now struggle to fight for equal economic opportunities, social esteem, and political rights, most significantly, the right to freely express homosexuality. This paper investigates the detrimental effects of English colonialism in molding India’s post-colonial culture of homophobia and oppressing the hijra community. Specifically, this research initially analyzes Hindu scriptures and ancient Indian texts to prove hijra’s pre-colonial prominent social roles and Indigenous Indian society’s tolerance towards homosexuality. By examining the origins of modern homophobia in England and the British East India Company’s unstable rule over India, this paper unveils the specific reasons why British Raj colonists created laws that criminalized the hijra community’s homosexuality. Through an analysis of colonial legislation, letters, and court cases, this essay unpacks how English institutions replaced India’s fluid understanding of sexuality with strict heteronormativity. Ultimately, since these homophobic colonial laws and thinking continue to impact former colonies, this paper uniquely argues that the fight for LGBTQ+ and hijra equality in post-colonial India is a fight for decolonization. While existing scholarship covers colonialism’s detrimental impact on the LGBTQ+ community, this research uniquely frames its argument through the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial history of the hijras and connects to the theme of decolonization.

Middle East, Russian history, Islam, colonialism, legal studies, law, world history, European history, digital humanities

A Queer Fight for Decolonization: British Colonialism’s Detrimental Impact on India’s Hijra Community

Creating a educational web-page for general audiences who are interested in learning more about the interrelationship of dance and feminism by analyzing the dance pieces of the pioneers of modern dance, and further connecting feminism themes and values demonstrated by modern era dancers to the history of the era, such as explaining how feminist ideas influenced or were formed by politics, the economy, social movements, and fashion…
Some questions that may be answered from my web-page: how did modern era dancers incorporate feminism values in their dance piece and influence the society? How did feminism values became prevalent in the period, and how did the public react? How are present dancers inspired by those pioneers (and comparing and contrasting feminism values of the past and the present).
Providing resources of classic dance videos of pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham. 
Including post-modern, feminism from Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown’s dance performances, how they reflect the evolution of feminist values and the current cultural climate of us.


Physiology, Biology, Anatomy, Biomechanics, Fine arts, Dance Theory, Dance History

Feminist Movements Embodied by Modern Dance

Two crucial factors to creating a mobile autonomous robot capable of quickly navigating a flat field are frequent accurate localization and efficient path following. Odometry and computer vision landmarks are two very common methods of localization, but they each have their pros and cons. Odometry has frequent velocity updates at the cost of position error accumulation. Computer vision has very accurate position measurements at the cost of frequency. These two sources of data can be “fused” to create a better position estimate using the Kalman Filter. The Kalman Filter is a full state estimator that can take in localization data of various measurements, frequencies, and certainties to calculate a better estimate of the true position state. 
Accurate localization allows for path following. Pure Pursuit is a path following algorithm that works by pursuing that furthest point on the path that is within a certain distance from the robot. It controls each state value separately from the others using a Proportional Integral Derivative Controller (PID). Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an algorithm that allows for control of a system. In this case, this system is the robot and its position. When controlling a system to reach the target state, MPC takes all state values into account at once when deciding what to do on each time step. What are the benefits and drawbacks of MPC and Pure Pursuit for use on a mobile robot to quickly reach a target while navigating around obstacles.

Programming, Robotics, Electronics

State estimation and motion planning for an autonomous competition robot

Working to understand the financial elements behind how orchestra's and venues operate and provide recommendations for keeping them open into the future. 

Meet Polygence Scholars and explore their projects